Star Trek Ruminations

100 Years Young: Part I: Musings About the Drayan Life-Cycle Part II: Is Aging an Inevitable Biological Fact? Part III: Can an Organism 'Grow' Smaller and Younger? Part IV: The Drayan Civilization If you're ready to accept, or at least consider, that aging isn't a biological necessity , accepting the idea that things might grow smaller over time should be a relatively simple matter. At the same time, there are some logistical problems to work out. Consider the following comment from a book about how science-fiction writers can craft convincing alien life-forms: "Every creature I know of starts out as a smaller structure produced in the body of one or more adults of its kind. To become an adult itself, it must grow" ( Aliens and Alien Societies , Stanley Schmidt). Schmidt's comment that things " must grow" does make a lot of sense—and in principle I am inclined to agree with him. This illustrates our second instinctive objection to the Drayan lif...

100 Years Young: Part I: Musings About the Drayan Life-Cycle Part II: Is Aging an Inevitable Biological Fact? Part III: Can an Organism 'Grow' Smaller and Younger? Part IV: The Drayan Civilization Regarding this first point, let me begin with the assertion that what we know as the aging process is not the fundamental truth we presume it to be. I recently came across an intriguing short story called "Invariant" by John Pierce about a scientist who learns how to stop biological aging. As the story explains: "The regeneration of limbs in salamanders led to the idea of perfect regeneration of human parts. How, say, a cut heals, leavng not a scar, but a perfect replica of the damaged tissue. How in normal metabolism tissue can be replaced not imperfectly, as in an aging organism, but perfectly, indfinitely." (The story deals with some unexpected results of his research - you may want to find a copy of this story to see how it ends.) The idea of "perfect re...